Alice Munros Best

explanation from him again.
    “Did you know you were being married?” he asked her. “Is it something you want, to be married?”
    No, she said. No. And the Franciscan clapped his hands. “Take off that gold trash!” he said. “Take those clothes off her! I am going to make her a Virgin!
    “If you become a Virgin, it will be all right,” he said to her. “The Muslim will not have to shoot anybody. But you must swear you will never go with a man. You must swear in front of witnesses.
Per quri e per kruch.
By the stone and by the Cross. Do you understand that? I am not going to let them marry you to a Muslim, but I do not want more shooting to start on this land.”
    It was one of the things the Franciscan tried so hard to prevent – the selling of women to Muslim men. It put him into a frenzy, that their religion could be so easily set aside. They sold girls like Lottar, who would bring no price anywhere else, and widows who had borne only girls.
    Slowly and sulkily the women removed all the rich clothes. They brought out men’s trousers, worn and with no braid, and a shirt and head scarf. Lottar put them on. One woman with an ugly pair of shears chopped off most of what remained of Lottar’s hair, which was difficult to cut because of the dressing.
    “Tomorrow you would have been a bride,” they said to her. Some of them seemed mournful, some contemptuous. “Now you will never have a son.”
    The little girls snatched up the hair that had been cut off and stuck it on their heads, arranging various knots and fringes.
    Lottar swore her oath in front of twelve witnesses. They were, of course, all men, and looked as sullen as the women about the turn things had taken. She never saw the Muslim. The Franciscan berated the men and said that if this sort of thing did not stop he would close up the churchyard and make them bury their dead in unholy ground. Lottar sat at a distance from them all, in her unaccustomed clothes. It was strange and unpleasant to be idle. When the Franciscan had finished his harangue, he came over and stood looking down at her. He was breathing hard because of his rage, or the exertions of the lecture.
    “Well, then,” he said. “Well.” He reached into some inner fold of his clothing and brought out a cigarette and gave it to her. It smelled of his skin.

    A NURSE BROUGHT in Charlotte’s supper, a light meal of soup and canned peaches. Charlotte took the cover off the soup, smelled it, and turned her head away. “Go away, don’t look at this slop,” she said. “Come back tomorrow – you know it’s not finished yet.”
    The nurse walked with me to the door, and once we were in the corridor she said, “It’s always the ones with the least at home who turn the most critical. She’s not the easiest in the world, but you can’t help kind of admiring her. You’re not related, are you?”
    Oh, no, I said. No.
    “When she came in it was amazing. We were taking her things off and somebody said, oh, what lovely bracelets, and right away she wanted to sell them! Her
husband
is something else. Do you know him? They are really quite the characters.”
    Charlotte’s husband, Gjurdhi, had come to my bookstore by himself one cold morning less than a week earlier. He was pulling a wagon full of books, which he had wrapped up in a blanket. He had tried to sell me some books once before, in their apartment, and I thought perhaps these were the same ones. I had been confused then, but now that I was on my own ground I was able to be more forceful. I said no, I did not handle secondhand books, I was not interested. Gjurdhi nodded brusquely, as if I had not needed to tell him this and it was of no importance to our conversation. He continued to pick up the books one by one, urging me to run my hands over the bindings, insisting that I note the beauty of the illustrations and be impressed by the dates of publication. I had to repeat my refusal over and over again, and I heard myself begin to attach some apologies to it, quite against my own will. He chose to understand each rejection as applying to an individual book and would simply fetch out another, saying vehemently, “This too! This is very beautiful. You will notice. And it is very old. Look what a beautiful old book!”
    They were travel books, some of them, from the turn of the century. Not so very old, and not so beautiful, either, with their dim, grainy photographs.
A Trek Through the Black Peaks. High Albania. Secret Lands of